Opinion: Take a look at the good news in the Middle East

AhmedAmer

Yes, there is good news coming out of the Middle East. Amid the reported horror, we have a story from Egypt that is not only reassuring, uplifting, and hope-inspiring, but also remarkably clear in what it says about Egyptian Muslims.

Those who follow events in Egypt know that there is a new Suez Canal planned. To finance the project, we have just witnessed one of the most impressive crowdfunding campaigns ever undertaken, and so I feel the world should hear more about it.

Ahmed Amer

There has been talk of developing the existing Suez Canal area for decades.

Former President Mohamed Morsi talked about it, but it remained just talk. His successor, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, recently announced the surprising goal of adding a second channel, and appears to be making it happen. The “new” Suez Canal, a 45-mile addition, would eliminate a one-way bottleneck that modern ships experience, and is expected to increase daily traffic from 25 ships per day to over 90.

Yet digging a new channel is not cheap. The project cost is nearly $9 billion. The Egyptian government planned to seek funding through multiple channels. The first phase was through investment certificates sold to Egyptian citizens, then to foreign investors. Beyond that, the plan would likely have involved international partner nations and lending agencies.

Politicians who claim to be religious don’t speak for religion, not in Egypt and not in America.

But then something amazing happened.

Like a Kickstarter campaign on steroids, Egyptians purchased in their local banks more than enough certificates to fund the entire project — in eight days.

Born and raised in Egypt, I am proud of this astounding achievement, but a bit sad that it has not been more widely reported.

But perhaps unreported news is better than poorly reported news. In another example of overlooked good news, we can look to portrayals of the ousting of Islamist president Morsi and its aftermath.

Once in power, el-Sisi first raised taxes, and food and fuel prices, and commenced an expensive anti-terror campaign against militant Morsi supporters. You might assume that getting popular support from members of the public might be tough. After all, look at what raising taxes slightly did to U.S. President George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election.

Indeed, one would think that el-Sisi’s popularity must have plummeted so dramatically low that Egyptians would never go out of their way to help him realize a project he’d championed, right?

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Instead, this amazing canal-funding story illustrates the reality that news from the Middle East can, in spite of media reporting or lack thereof, be positive. And it is not the first example.

Last year, when the largest public protests in modern history in the Middle East demanded an end to Morsi’s reign, the army did not put down the uprising, but rather removed the unpopular president from power. And when Egyptians voted el-Sisi into office, one of the most powerful Islamist political forces was unequivocally rejected by a nation that constitutes a quarter of the world’s Arab Muslims.

The election was the clearest statement ever that Islamists do not speak for Muslims, but this fact was barely noted.

El-Sisi was voted into power with almost double the votes his Islamist predecessor had secured, but pundits pushed the poisonously false narrative that “Islamists must be popular amongst Muslims,” and the election was criticized for a small drop in turnout. What went unreported was that this 7% drop was the best a near-total Islamist boycott of the election could muster.

There also were claims that removing Islamists from power in Egypt would lead to a civil war along religious and secular lines. The view that majority Muslim countries inevitably vote Islamist is not only naïve, but it arguably slanders religion by equating it to politics.

Politicians who claim to be religious don’t speak for religion, not in Egypt and not in America.

The astonishing speed of the funding campaign’s success speaks to the inherent goodness and hopefulness of people. It promises the opposite of that dire prediction of a society divided by those who exploit and malign religion to turn people against each other, because Egyptians, like humans everywhere, want peace and prosperity.

Egyptian by birth and American by choice, Ahmed Amer is an associate professor of computer engineering at Santa Clara University.

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